Logo Design
Making clever simple and simple clever
A logo is your principal point of graphic market place recognition for your customers. In order to be effective it must adhere to five simple principles: be simple, memorable, timeless, versatile and appropriate. Good logo design is far from a 5 minute process, be wary of anyone who will offer you a design for less than a days work, it is simply not possible to design effectively within that time frame. At Stonefern we listen to our clients, know their target audience, take into consideration all of their input, study the details, weigh the options, and then, if necessary, ignore all of it and design what we know will work best.... after all, we do this for a living...
The Process
You have ideas, we have questions...time we starting chatting
Our design process consists of 6 key stages. Firstly, a full and effective design brief from the client, face to face is best, coffee is essential. Secondly, extensive market research and brainstorming. Next we produce a series of design sketches and directions for client feedback. Then we move onto prototyping and conceptualisation. Then we go back again to the client for second review and feedback. Finally after revision and finishing touches we provide the client with a fully scalable vectored artboard with built in colour, design and reproduction standards. Normally this process takes 2 full studio days.
Fonts
A great library of characters, punctuation and numbers wrapped in 32 million colour references
Every font evokes a different emotion in its context. An eye will scan the letter shapes and the brain decodes the visual language giving it an idea about the type of message you are about to receive before you have even read the content. Get it wrong and a brand feels utterly unconnected to its product or market, get it right and you can simply use your name as your logo. Choosing and implementing the right font type for your company logo is not just about recognisability, its also about choosing a font that communicates the right message to the general public. Stonefern stays up to date on new release fonts and has a strong proven “eye” for what will and will not work on logo designs.
Brand Language
A brand is not simply a trademark, a design, a slogan or an easily remembered picture.
It is a studiously crafted personality profile of an individual, institution, corporation, product or service. A strong logo design will drive out your entire brand, its values, ambitions, character and soul. Corporate identity starts to appear when your logo and brand begin to drive out a corporate style that your customers attach values to. We can help ensure that this process starts on the strongest footing. This is only achievable by strong design and flexible design standards that ensure consistency in your graphical representation in the marketplace. Consistency is one of the most powerful usability principles: when things always behave the same, customers don’t have to worry about what will happen. Instead, they know what will happen based on an earlier experience.
Rebrand or Refresh
Your brand shouldn't rest on the last decades ideas
We can help take your existing brand and sensitively update its look, feel and reproduction on modern mediums. So many clients who approach us have a low res JPEG of their logo which they use for whole scale reproduction. In todays modern marketplace you really need a vectored file of your logo. With this you can reproduce your brand on anything from a website to a 30ft wide billboard without any loss of resolution. It make sense to use this opportunity to refresh your brand with subtle but key font and palette changes. We can also 'modernise' graphical elements and advise you on how to achieve the best reproduction results within the framework of your existing brand.
At one time or another every company needs to update their image and inject something new. We can help completely rebrand your business. This process is no different to producing a new brand with the exception that the client will have an emormous wealth of marketplace experience and customer feedback. This information is essential and can be used to ensure your rebrand can help make a real difference between a sale for you or a sale for your competitor.
Roll-Outs
Implementing your new brand across your business
Now you have your rebrand or refresh you need to roll it out across your business. Stonefern can build comprehensive brand design standards for you. Design standards are an essential element of any business brand. They help to maintain brand guardianship when the brand is to be implemented across a wide range of mediums. There is no point in paying a designer to produce a strong cohesive rebrand or refresh for your business if the model is not going to be followed. It is essential that key design elements and the message of a brand are not diluted or altered by third parties who may be supplying your business. This is where a strong set of design guidelines is essential. It also gives your business the opportunity to introduce its personality, voice and appearance to its employees and in turn, train them to all portray the same company ethos to your customer base. Manuals can cover everything from typography and signage specifications to dress code and company messages. With this information Stonefern can help source for you all your print, social media, web, livery and advertising requirements.
